JetBrains has announced that it is abandoning its plan to create a standalone Kotlin Multiplatform IDE and is planning to deprecate support for KMP on its lightweight Fleet IDE in order to focus its efforts on better KMP support on the IntelliJ Platform.

Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) is a technology that allows you to write code once in Kotlin and then reuse it across multiple platforms. It works by compiling your Kotlin code into different formats:

• Kotlin/Native: Compiles Kotlin code into native code for platforms like iOS, macOS, and others. This allows your Kotlin code to run directly on these platforms with near-native performance.
• Kotlin/JVM: Compiles Kotlin code into bytecode that runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). This is used for Android development and server-side applications.
• Kotlin/JS: Compiles Kotlin code into JavaScript that can run in web browsers. This allows you to write web applications in Kotlin.

As I explained in 2023 when JetBrains released the stable version of Kotlin Multiplatform:

The main benefit of Kotlin Multiplatform is its flexibility. Developers can share only part of their app's logic and write native code if they want to interact with platform-specific APIs or build native UIs. The framework can also be combined with Compose Multiplatform, JetBrains' declarative framework for sharing UIs across multiple platforms.

In his announcement of the new focus on support for KMP on the IntelliJ Platform, Hadi Hariri explains that this is in response to feedback from users who have asked for the features that were being built on the Fleet platform to be available in both IntelliJ IDEA and in Android Studio, a demand strengthened by Google's official support of KMP on Android, dating from May 2024.

Hariri also refers to the recent announcement of Junie, JetBrain's new AI coding agent which, at launch, is a available to users of IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate. While he doesn't make any explicit link between the introduction of Junie and the deprecation of Fleet for KMP, it does strengthen the idea of a general shift in strategy in which is prioritizing both KMP support and AI-assisted development within its flagship IntelliJ platform. 

• Mike James is the author of Programmers Guide To Kotlin, 3rd Ed written for Java programmers, Android developers and programmers wanting to discover why Kotlin is a better Java and of Android Programming in Kotlin: Starting With An App.

More Information

Kotlin Multiplatform

Fleet Website

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